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Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Eugene
O’Neill The Hairy Ape / Los Angeles,
The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, the production I saw was on Sunday, July 24, 2016

I
have to admit, I have always had trouble with Eugene O’Neill’s early plays,
particularly his 1921 work, The Hairy Ape.
American Expressionism (not nearly as sophisticated and developed as the German
version—at least until it found its way into the American film noir) is just not my favorite kind of
theater. And with his heavy typologies and his embarrassingly clumsy use of
dialect, O’Neill’s younger works always slightly embarrass me, as opposed to
his great later family dramas.

I did not have the opportunity, alas, to
see the much praised deconstruction of this work by the noted Wooster Group; I
keep hoping for a revival or a filming of the play, as they have packaged for
their brilliant production of O’Neill’s The
Emperor Jones, but in the meantime, while attempting to see most
productions of O’Neill plays, I had skirted this one, even after buying a
ticket. Finally, I gave in at the very last moment, attending the last
performance of the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble’s production directed by the
British director and actor, Steven Berkoff.

Berkoff, known for his very physical
productions, did not disappoint this time around, transforming the early
boozing and singing scenes into a series of choreographed movements for his 9
male ship firemen, at moments, with the percussion accompaniment of Will
Mahood, whipping them up into a kind of fiery frenzy, while at other times
slowing down the action to a kind of slow-motion line-dance as he lets his hero
Yank (Haile D’Alan) try to work out the reality, as the group’s leader, he
wants to convey to them.

The director, the time around, has
chosen a black man to play the usually white Yank (real name Robert Smith). The
African American actor Paul Robeson did play the same figure in England in the
1930s, but these days there seems a slight danger in that casting, as Los Angeles Times reviewer Charles
McNulty pointed out, of associating the “brutal beast” of the play with
negative racial implications; this might have been mitigated a bit by having a
more multi-racial cast as a whole, but Berkoff evidently didn’t see that as a
problem.

It’s true that all of these men are
equally just a step up from the apes, their crouching positions and
gorilla-like muscles determined by their hourly activity of stoking coal into
the ship’s engines. And the play is not really about racial inequities, but
about issues of class.

In the early scenes Yank is proud of his
Prometheus-like role; it is, after all, he and his friends who make the big
industries possible; without their endlessly hard labor, there would be no
American industry, no ships to grandly sail into New York harbor, as their own
steamliner is about to do.

D’Alan is a splendid example of a human
being, a muscular specimen of a man who shows his physical stamina just by
performing, in this case, as a jazzed up actor: shouting out his lines yet with
emotional significance, he seems to be filled with boundless energy, as he
mocks his fellow workers, particularly the drunken elderly Paddy (Dennis
Gerstein) who nostalgically recalls the days of sail-driven ships, when the
sailors were at one with the sea, instead of being locked up in the dark
dungeon of the stove-hole.

Similarly, Yank has little use for the
Marxian ideas of his friend Long (Paul Stanko), for he is a believer, a man
proud of his own physicality and ability to cope.

That is until the wealthy ship-owner’s
daughter, Mildred (Katy Davis), dressed entirely in white, mindlessly
determines to visit the stoke-hole to see “how the other half lives.” At the
very moment she arrives, Yank is haranguing his co-workers with curses for
their lack of gumption and grit, while they have stopped in their tracks, awed
by the young woman’s sudden appearance. As Yank looks behind him to observe her
presence, she mutters something about a beast and swoons into a faint of
terror.

Despite the appellation of a beast, it
is Yank, however, who is the true thinker, and the next scene finds him
pondering the events, while realizing that to her he was simply a “hairy ape.”
Although his friends attempt to console him, even ribbing him with the
possibility that he is in a funk because he has fallen in love, Yank suddenly
perceives his braggadocio for what it is: he as he friends are nothing but
small machine parts in a world that has little place for them.

The rest of O’Neill’s play is rather
didactic triptych, in which Yank attempts to explore what he can do to change
his life situation and to find a role in the general society. His first trip is
the Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, where the wealthy parade in surreal-like fashion
after church. His presence totally ignored by these “swells,” he finally
threatens a male of the group, as all present in the small buffalo herd call
for the police, who quickly arrive and beat him.

Berkoff has thankfully dropped the prison
scene, and given the speech to Long, the Marxist, to tell his friend of the IWW
and the “wobblies,” who The New York
Times reports are trying to destroy American industry and society.
Believing what he has read, Yank is stupidly ready to sign up.

But in the second part of the triptych,
within the IWW headquarters, after being given a hearty welcome and membership
card, he is mocked when he makes his desires to dynamite factories clear. Not
only are the wobblies paranoid (suspecting him of being a policeman, a factory
stooge, or even from the FBI) but their activities, obviously, are quite
different from the newspaper reports. And they quickly toss Yank out into the
streets once more.

Does he have no place in society he
asks? No way of entering the “real” world. And here the fact of the actor being
black does have resonance. Certainly in the world of the original play there
would have no even been a place for him on O’Neill’s Broadway stage.

The inevitable and truly surreal ending
is that he must become precisely that which he has already been turned into by
the dominant society. At the Zoo’s gorilla cage, convincingly filled with
chattering monkeys and a gorilla performed by his former shipmates, Yank
encounters the highly-developed pectorals and muscular arms of fellow actor Jeremiah
O’Brian playing the Alpha-male gorilla. What Yank is to his fellow shipmates,
this human-gorilla is to his chattering monkey companions. It is almost love at
first site, as Yank determines to loose this fellow monster upon the world,
breaking open his cage. There is almost something horribly homoerotic about the
act, as the gorilla comes toward him in, what a first seems simply to be a hug.
Indeed, Yank responds, “I didn’t say you should kiss me,” before he gradually
perceives that he is being killed, his body stomped upon again and again until
he finally finds his place in death.

Berkoff’s production is far from
perfect, but then the play is, as both director and producer remind us, the
work of a very young playwright, still attempting to find his voice. And this
production, despite its many excellent moments, demonstrates, once more, why The Hairy Ape is so seldom revived. In
the end, I am glad a got to chance to see it—and still will look forward to
seeing the Wooster Group version. After all, it was that group which also
convinced me that O’Neill’s early sea plays were worth a second viewing.